Project teams delivering treatment plants, industrial processes and power stations routinely work with documents such as:
The purpose of these documents is to give the process control engineers and system integrators, clear and unambiguous messages about how each module of a plant is designed to operate (automatically).
Yet when hydraulic engineering teams deliver a new asset into a water distribution network, or a wastewater network, the above style of documentation is typically absent. As operation of large networks, pumping facilities and pressure/flow control stations, have become more complicated, we have seen some automation projects fail to be commissioned correctly. This has been largely due to the lack of control documentation provided in a format that the process control team could work with.
jClem Consulting views cross-country pipelines and city water distribution networks, as examples of "plants". The only difference being that these plants spread over bigger portions of the landscape. Their automation deserves the same level of unambiguous documentation.
jClem Consulting evaluates each project as a "system" and documents each element of the system with its own functional control diagrams and control statements.
